In the fall of 2015, I took a User Interfaces course at Brown, where I was introduced to the fields of UI/UX as well as some approaches to designing and testing interfaces. I worked with several other students on a group project to create an interface from scratch for a hypothetical hitchhiking app. We called the app Hiker. The idea was that people looking for a ride and drivers with space in their car could use Hiker to find each other.

Why would drivers even bother downloading an app to give out free rides? We implemented a “credit system” in which every starting user is given 20 miles in credits to spend–the as in, they can be driven 20 miles for free. In order to gain more mile credits, they could either act as a driver to another user to earn mile credits, or buy credits by paying real money. That way, both the hikers and the drivers would have an incentive to use the app. Hiker could (hypothetically) produce an entire community of co-dependent hitchhikers and drivers.

Final mockups and flows were developed in Sketch, after a round of paper prototypes and user testing.